The resilience of urban infrastructure to extreme weather events has gained incredible amount of researcher, practitioner, and public attention over the last several years. Many researchers and practitioners engaged in resilient infrastructure design have increasingly realized that the necessary design changes are not possible without preceding changes in governance arrangements. Not only has our infrastructure been physically designed for a climate that no longer exists, but so too have our governance structures. This presentation will first review some of the shifts toward a focus on the innovations required in governance regimes to support more resilient urban infrastructure systems. Following this, I will then ask how we can “square the circle” and develop the concepts, questions, tools, and methods required to explore how changes in governance enable (or not) transformations in infrastructure design.

From Resilient Infrastructure Design to Resilience Governance and Back Again